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Ken Werner

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Articles by Ken Werner

HDTV Expert - Smart Watches Have Not Excited Consumers - But They're About To

HDTV Expert - Smart Watches Have Not Excited Consumers - But They're About To

The smart watch market remains nascent, with Samsung's first-generation Galaxy Gear selling roughly one million units at $299 despite poor reviews and suspected warehouse stockpiles. Motorola's Moto 360, running Google's Android Wear OS with a round full-color LCD and refined watch-like design, is positioned as a potential breakout product if priced at $250 or below. With LG, Samsung, and fashion brand Fossil also adopting Android Wear, the OS could establish platform dominance similar to Windows on PCs, making display technology choices - LCD, OLED, mirasol, and emerging Pixtronix MEMS - a key differentiator.

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HDTV Expert - January's TV is February's Digital Sign

HDTV Expert - January's TV is February's Digital Sign

Technologies debuted at CES 2014, including 4K Ultra HD panels and multi-touch displays, rapidly transitioned to commercial digital signage applications at the Digital Signage Expo just weeks later, with LG's 105-inch Ultra HD display and 55-inch OLED Gallery TV among the crossover products. Transparent LCD panels, demonstrated by LG-MRI and others in commercial refrigerator doors and retail kiosks, showed notably improved color saturation alongside genuine transparency. For signage professionals, the convergence of gesture control, customer analytics, and large-format touch interfaces signals a significant shift toward interactive, data-driven display deployments.

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4K Ultra HD

HDTV Expert - Thursday Evening at a Sony Store

Sony's 84-inch 4K LCD TV at $25,000 MSRP anchors a broader discussion of the company's strategic pivot away from PC hardware toward a media ecosystem built around smartphones and televisions. Quantum-dot enhanced LCD panels, which deliver expanded color gamut at modest added cost, illustrate how quickly hardware advantages erode in consumer electronics. Sharp's Quattron+ four-subpixel technology offers near-4K picture definition at roughly half the price of true 4K sets, though patent protection may prove a temporary shield in a fast-moving display market.

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OLED TVsLCD TVs

HDTV Expert - QD Vision Co-Founder Predicts Death of OLED-TV

QD Vision co-founder and CTO Seth Coe-Sullivan argued at the SID Los Angeles Chapter conference that OLED-TV will become irrelevant within five years, citing quantum-dot-enhanced LCD backlights as capable of exceeding OLED color gamut while consuming less power than OLED panels displaying a white screen. He systematically dismantled eight pro-OLED arguments, noting that mature LCD fabs maintain yield and cost advantages over OLED manufacturing processes such as ink-jet printing and OVJP, which have proven harder to scale than anticipated. For consumers, this suggests that quantum-dot LCD televisions - already appearing in 2013 Sony and Amazon Kindle Fire HDX products - may deliver premium picture quality at lower prices than OLED alternatives.

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HDTV Expert - Samsung was King of the CES Hill
Events & Trade Shows4K Ultra HD

HDTV Expert - Samsung was King of the CES Hill

Samsung dominated CES 2014 with a sweeping UHD TV lineup spanning 50 to 110 inches, featuring PurColor wide-gamut technology, a quad-core processor, and UHD upscaling claimed to deliver near-native-4K image quality. A joint announcement with M-Go and Technicolor confirmed that native-4K streaming requires 15 Mb/sec bandwidth while optimized upscaled content needs as little as 3 Mb/sec, giving streaming providers meaningful flexibility. Samsung also previewed a 4K content partnership with Amazon and an Evolution Kit for firmware upgrades, signaling a long-term ecosystem play that extends well beyond the display hardware itself.

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